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Klout

As you are probably aware, website and mobile app Klout, which allows users to measure their influence using social media analytics and rewards them for high scores, expertise and influence in particular topics, will be shuttering its service towards the end of this month.

As social leadership is an increased focus for global businesses, BusinessNext went in search of the top 25 CMOs in Fortune 100 Companies. In the end, they could only find 20 as only one in five CMOs on the Fortune 100 list are active in public social networks. I’d concur, though, that number is higher than previous years.

Despite The CMO Survey’s recent projection of an 150% increase in social spending in marketing budgets over the next five years, the majority of the senior staff holding the purse strings are yet to establish a social footprint of their own. Is this an indication that they don’t understand the space, or is it that they put their efforts in promoting the brands they work for instead of the brand of “me”?

Journalists and news creators, who by nature are at the top of the social news cycle, as well as content creators for brands that offer value to their communities should be aware of these six great tools.

As part of my role here at Econsultancy as Content Marketing Executive, I was immediately immersed in product demos and in-person meetings for new products in the burgeoning social web discovery space.

Here are six immediate standouts from the pack that I feel other content marketers should be using and why.

Thanks to the rise of social media, there’s a mad race to measure influence and help brands harness it to their advantage. That has created an ecosystem of companies vying to prove that they can most accurately identify the social media users with the most clout.

Since inception, online influencer targeting has been a fraught activity.

In the early 2000s, brands had to fight the temptation to simply create their own fake influencers. Perfection of mommy blog targeting (one product for you and one to give away to your fans) was often achieved at the cost of polarizing their community over issues of authenticity. If individuals can’t trust their community leaders to not be unduly influenced by what are perceived as bribes, who can they trust?

Klout, which familiarized a mass of consumers with influence measurement, has regularly been the subject of withering criticism. “Kill me if I Klout,” wrote the gadget-catchall Gizmodo. “If I’ve ever interacted with Klout… punch me in the face,” said the net-comic XKCD.

Few social media companies are as controversial as Klout, which seeks to measure the influence individuals have within social networks.

For some, the company, which has raised tens of millions of dollars in funding, is the “standard for influence” it describes itself as. Others are more skeptical, questioning the ability of any company to truly measure who has influence in any meaningful way.

We are in a time of convergence. Traditionally, influence was in the hands of the media. Now anyone with access to a cell phone can be engaged and influence a community. As our online identities now focus on our real name, personal brand isn’t merely a celebrity worry anymore.

How this influence is measured is changing and Klout and Kred (amongst others) are all vying to be the barometer that we use to measure it. But which one is going to top the other or is there room for them all?

Social influence measurement company Klout is moving into the mobile space, acquiring Blockboard for an unknown sum.

Blockboard says that it “uses technology to connect neighbours and build stronger neighbourhoods”. Its mobile app features a bulletin board that users can use to post messages for their local community to view and interact with.

Here’s how it is being positioned: “The Sunday Times Social List is set to become the definitive measure of the most influential people within the social space.”

Tricky. The trouble with measuring ‘influence’ is that it is incredibly difficult to do so in an automated way. I think it’s virtually impossible to make any real statements about who is and isn’t influential without some form of human analysis.

These tools are of course works in progress, and as they stand they are certainly indicators of something, but I’m not sure they’re indicators of true influence.